Of course, the crowd had also connected with Malcolm, or to be more accurate had connected with his collarbone, his left ankle, his skull and four of his ribs.
Margaret tells me that this is why she now goes to football, to experience that incredible moment when the crowd becomes a single powerful creature, when for a split-second it feels as though anything in the world is possible just by needing it.
She tries to tell me that here is something mystic, deep-rooted and inexplicable, but I point out the simple truth: when you have so many thousand people all concentrating on one man's ability to plant a ball in the back of a net, you harness an energy that can shift the world from its axis.
Margaret's children can tell you what life is really like. It smells of frying onions, and will beat the shit out of you if you resist it.
LOOKING FOR BOLIVAR
There are a number of ways you can change your life in a week.
You can fall in love with the wrong person. Career-switch from banking to wicker repair. Experience religious conversion. Get caught shoplifting. Change your barber. Undergo an epiphanal moment when you realise that you'll never drive through Rio in an open-top Mercedes unless you stop spending your weekends drifting around the shops looking at things you don't really want. What I mean is, at some point you either realise who you are and act toward the grain of your personality, no matter how unpalatable that might turn out to be, or you end up in a kind of bitter emotional cul-de-sac that eventually leads to you machine-gunning thirty people dead in McDonald's.
I saw this ad once for running shoes or CDs that said 'Whoever you are, be someone else.' I was twenty-four when I realised I could no longer imagine being someone else, and decided to make a change before it was too late. I moved from London to New York, and ended up looking for Bolivar.
As a child I was sickly, timid, sensible. Rejected by other kids, adored by adults. 'So grown-up!' my aunt would marvel, pinching my face between her fingers as if reaching a decision on curtain material. I left college with unimpressive credentials and was employed in the customer relations department of Barclays Bank, a job with an interest factor equivalent to staring at mud. To spend an evening in the pub with my colleagues was to grasp a sense of the infinite.
I rented a dingy flat in North London. 'It's not a lowerground,' my estate-agent brother informed me, 'it's a basement. I should know.' I failed to meet the Right Girl. 'Plenty of time for that,' said my mother, who had a mouth designed for holding pins, 'after you've done some hard work.' When the possibility of a transfer came up I took it without quite knowing why, although shifting from such a domineering family to a place where my nearest relative would be several thousand miles away seemed the sensible thing to do.
Maybe I was sick of living in a city that looked like a fish tank whose owner had forgotten to change its water. Maybe I went to New York because the streets were wide and thelight was high, because the wind swept in from the sea, because at night the town looked like Stromboli's fairground – how many reasons could there be?
On the day I left, I found myself at the departure gate surrounded by relatives vying with each other to impart advice. I boarded the flight with a head full of rules and lectures, and forgot them all before we landed.
The big things about New York were over-familiar before I'd even seen them. Vertiginous chromium avenues and yellow cabs were so instantly commonplace that they were rendered curiously unimpressive. Rather, I remember being struck by ground-level details. The colours of old Manhattan, faded reds and browns, interiors painted a dingy shade of ochre peculiar to the city. Those little iron hoops that bordered all the trees. Racks of vegetables sprayed with water. Basketball courts on the street. Smelly subway gratings through which could be heard the distant thunder of trains. Vending machines chained to the ground, but trusting you enough to take just one newspaper.
The bank rented me an apartment in Hoboken. My first mistake was to lease a flat where the bedroom window was situated above a bus stop. I had no idea people would actually sit on the bench below all night long, talking and playing ghetto-blasters. I wasn't about to go down and ask men with grey cotton hoods protruding over leather jackets to turn the music down.
After six weeks I was desperate. I am a light sleeper at the best of times, but this was impossible; I arrived at Union Square each morning lurching into work like a zombie. Finally I arranged to break the lease and move to another apartment in a quieter neighbourhood, but there was a shortfall between the dates of about a week, when I would have nowhere to stay.
One evening in early June I went out with some people from the bank. They were more conservative in conversation than their London counterparts, but spoke frankly of their careers and finances – subjects we tend to regard as slightly taboo. They were sending off a teller named Dean Stanowicz, who was leaving under some kind of cloud nobody wanted to talk about. We went to this little Jewish restaurant and they gave him a gaudy iced cake, a tradition for every staff birthday, anniversary and wedding. For some reason I found myself explaining my housing problem to Dean, and he told me about a woman he knew who owned an apartment on West 44th Street. It seemed this woman – I couldn't decide how the two of them were related – was going into hospital for a hip operation, and she needed someone to take care of her apartment for a week. It was perfect. Our dates matched exactly. Her name was Mary Amity, which sounded friendly.
Until then it hadn't occurred to me that people lived in the centre of Manhattan. On Saturday morning I arrived at the front door of Miss Amity's building carrying a bag of clothes, a bulky set of keys and a page of scribbled instructions. Dean was supposed to have taken me around the place on Friday evening, but didn't seem very reliable. I had called his home number, but his message service was switched on. I don't know what I was expecting to find inside that tall terraced house with brown window frames and black railings. I had not yet been invited inside an American home – my colleagues worked hard and kept to themselves, valuing their privacy and guarding it accordingly. I suspected they considered me unfriendly, and back then perhaps I was.
A deep brown hallway – that colour again – smelled of freshly polished boots, and led to four gloomy flights of stairs. At the top of these, a firetruck-red front door sported three hard-to-open locks. The keys weren't marked, and the elimination process took me twenty minutes. I resolved to label them before I attempted to regain entry. I was a tidy man, and liked labelling things.
Inside, a narrow hall led to a disproportionately enormous lounge that smelled strongly of cigarettes. There were dozens of scruffy plants dotted in between comfortable pieces of furniture, and as many stacks of books. In the corner was an easel with an odd half-finished painting of what appeared to be a three-legged cow, or an overweight hairless cat, on it. There were a number of seventies' new age items scattered about, including a blue glass bong and several sets of redundant wind chimes. Miss Amity had been admitted to hospital two days earlier, so I had the place to myself, or so I thought. No sooner had I set my bag down when a man in white overalls wandered out of the kitchen with a mug of tea in his hands, real PG-Tips-tea, not those perfumed things on strings you get in New York cafes.
'Hi,' he said amiably, 'do you know if there's a toy store around here?'
Thrown, I shrugged. 'I'm new in town. I don't know where everything is yet.'
'See, I gotta get my kid this troop-carrier spaceship for his birthday and I ain't got time to get to FAO Schwartz. Sixty bucks for something that'll be broke in a week. Crazy, huh? Makes me wish a bunch of real mean aliens would turn up and blast the shit outta the place just so kids would stop wanting models of 'em.'